Full Self-Acceptance:
The Ultimate New Year's Resolution

By Robbie Engelmann

Oprah Winfrey's contributions to helping people achieve the lives they dream of is admirable. Yet her continuous message urging us to live our BEST life can be exhausting. This message gets reinforced in popular magazines and other media everywhere we turn. We are encouraged to become more this, less that — thinner, richer, smarter, more fashionable – all with the goal of being better. Very often this message is linked to a product we're urged to buy to help us in this quest to be our best.

When is enough, enough? When does it become okay to live the life we're living?

To be not only okay, but happy in who we are? When does it become okay not to feel compelled to keep changing?

As a therapist and life coach, it feels a bit odd to have this feeling. After all, I'm in the business of helping people change their lives and the majority of people invest in therapy or coaching because they feel the need to change something.

Many of us have had difficult or traumatic experiences and do feel less than what we'd like to be. Asking for support is a sign of strength. One person supporting another can help make the process of change easier, more possible and sometimes even more enjoyable. This healing can bring profound and welcome life changes.

But the continuous drive to always be better is different and can be damaging and counter-productive, a kind of personal growth marathon that doesn't stop. We become so pre-occupied with what we need to change that we are always striving, never completely content with who we are. We get stuck in the 'it's never enough' syndrome and feel we simply have to keep changing. Somehow we don't understand that it is when we finally learn to accept ourselves fully that we become free.

When we accept ourselves fully we experience wholeness within ourselves. This sense of wholeness enriches our lives. The paradox is that by exchanging profound self-acceptance with the drive to constantly change, we actually become freer and more able to create whatever life we wish. Change occurs more naturally and easily without the compulsive drive to have to change or be better. This year, as many of us think about the New Year and making resolutions, why not consider making just one: Love and accept yourself fully. Gather the people and resources around you which will help you do just that. It could be the most satisfying resolution you ever keep.

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